Apricot Strip and Apricot Tartlets with Almond Cream

 An apricot pastry party!

5 dollars for a whole basket of apricots and two-for-one French butter – a sure sign as any to make apricot pastries:) Especially since I have less than a year to finish the project, and I won’t have another apricot season to work through. I thought I should finish off the fruit while I had the chance. With a whole basket at hand, I was able to have a raw, unadulterated, unenhanced apricot for the first time in my life – I ate it like a fruit, not a dessert. I thought it tasted quite peachy.

Puff pastry weighted down and ready to go into the oven.

Like many amateur bakers, I harbored a fear of puff pastry and put off tackling it for nearly a year. For good reason. I remember Jamie Oliver saying that, while working with “just as good” store-bought pastry, if you’re making puff pastry from scratch, you need to get yourself a job. Maybe he’s right. Because I did 7 ‘turns’ of the pastry, with thirty minutes of cooling in between each turn (layering). This took an entire Sunday and converted my kitchen into a floured disaster area. Oy!

Naturally, I was quite nervous about how the puff pastry would turn out. Will I be able to achieve the thousand layers? Let alone the layers, what if it turns out hard like pie crust? These fears were further fueled by teensy tears during the rolling (which was like watching my kid skinning its knees), uneven edges (getting bad grades), and even some tiny lumps of dough and butter (why are they there?!). The whole process was filled with a queer mixture of doom and expectation…

And… They turned out beautifully!

Oh yes, there were many layers.

When I was a kid, I hated it when my mom would try to extract a lesson from everything around me. Moralizing is sooo annoying. And yet, I feel the need to do it now. (Perhaps I’m growing up?) I think the one “lesson” that I’m “learning” from all this baking is to just marshal through, no matter what. Because many of my pies and pastries seem like disasters until everything comes together – at the very end. And even then, they’re not perfect; I can list a whole bunch of things I can improve on. But it still tastes ah-mazing! There’s a whole range of good to awesome beneath this mythical “perfect.” I think I needed tangible (taste-able) evidence to believe in this.

I think I may come to worship French butter. The aroma of French-butter-made-pastry was just outta this world. Heavenly, period. Perhaps a good argument for making your own puff pastry. Homemade wins once again!